Sometimes it can be sensed when a useful convention changes so much it is apparent it is becoming harmful. We feel that's what happened last week when educational leaders in Maryland joined 10 other states in calling for a cutback in the incessant testing conducted in classrooms to measure the quality of education our children are receiving. We think this has been a long time coming.
Whether we are parents or taxpayers, we want to know that the children in our public schools are absorbing knowledge in the classroom that will outfit them for further education, career, citizenship and life in general. Schools measure what youngsters are learning by testing them. In Maryland and several other states, these tests are conducted by an educational consortium called Partnership For Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.
We don't question the usefulness of testing. Test scores, however, began taking on a worrisome significance — becoming "metrics" signifying the quality of teachers, schools and even school districts. The intellectual growth of a student was reduced to a numbers game.
This spring, some half a million students in Maryland in grades three through eight are taking tests in math and English in March and May. The tests this year will be 90 minutes shorter for elementary and middle school youngsters. For high schoolers, the testing hours will go down from 11.1 hours to 9.7 hours. These are modest turnarounds, but at least they are in the right direction.
Applause has greeted this application of brakes to testing mania. Educators have pointed out that their mission, more and more, has shifted into test preparation, that the period from March to May is one long stretch of drilling so students can perform well in math and reading tests. This, in fact, is lost instructional time.
Complicating matters further is the fact that many schools do not have enough computers to conduct testing and teach lessons at the same time. Teachers with lesson plans that require computers are left frustrated because the computers are being monopolized for testing.
In a larger sense, this constant testing is failing students by turning them into professional test takers and failing teachers by making them into test preppers. Figuring out answers to convoluted and often gimmicky test questions is not the same as getting an education. We're glad to see that Maryland's educational leadership has figured this out and is taking steps to correct it.